The Labyrinth of the Dead Page 7

Portia swung and blocked with the axe, chopping through fingers and arms as easily as cutting up carrots with a kitchen knife. But there were always more, cramming themselves bodily onto the bridge. Nails shrieked as they tore loose and the structure began to weaken. An upward arc cleft one face in two, but as the reaper fell, more just climbed over the body to reach her. And so it went; as Portia dropped one assailant, two more took its place until she had retreated just past the apex of the span and over twenty reapers—living, injured, and dead—were crowded onto the ornamental bridge.

  The collapse began as a moan and a shudder that quickly progressed into a violent shaking, compounded by the crush of reapers trying to remove themselves before they faced a watery end. Portia jumped, flapping her wings in a slow, steady beat to gain as much altitude as possible.

  The reapers leaped as well, and they jumped higher. The barbed hooks dug into her trousers and her skin, catching on whatever they touched. She could not escape their weight, and they pulled her down toward them. She swung wildly with the axe, severing fingers, hands, and arms, but more came. There were always more.

  As she fought to stay aloft, she saw the supports blow out in a shower of splintered wood. The decking fell straight down before it broke into pieces on the stream’s bed. Jagged shafts of wood impaled a handful of the reapers, and the water began to scald the rest. Portia landed heavily atop them all, finding little to soften her fall among the armored bodies sharp with bone spurs. It stung mightily to tear the hooks from her flesh, and each time she rested her weight anywhere, more pierced her. She crawled over the moaning pile toward the leader, watching a safe distance from the water’s edge. He was alone and still smirking. Her trousers stuck to her blood-slicked legs and reapers insistently clawed at her, hindering her progress. The reek of their bubbling, melting flesh gagged her.

  The commander strolled to the stream bank and raised his fist once more.

  The reserve came crashing through the gates: reapers and herders with their dire hounds. The queen had sent an army.

  They hit her like a wave, knocking her back into the pile of dead and dying reapers, impaling her on all sides with their damned spikes. She cried out and lightning flashed. They did not stop.

  Portia called on her last caches of power, letting white hot light surge through her. Where her renewed blood touched them, they burned, some turning to cinders in the span of heartbeats. Others fell back, but most kept reaching for her. Water sloshed over her head and she sputtered. She was pulled into the air only to be dropped into the stream once more. Rank steam rose from the hands that held her, dissolving their flesh down to the bone, but never letting her go. A bubble of pain and terror burst within her and for a blissful moment, the attackers were blown back. Portia leaped for the grass, struggling free of the waterlogged bodies that threatened to drag her down with them.

  On her knees, she coughed up water and blood. The axe was gone and she felt the lack of it keenly. A dark smear of blood slowly saturated her corset. The power within her was no longer a ranging fire, but a small candle, flickering.

  She saw the commander’s boots as he came to stand before her.

  "Brava." His voice was dry and grating. "We knew you’d be a challenge to catch. I’ll get a fine reward for this."

  Portia spat at him and he backhanded her, driving his own barbed spikes deep into the flesh of her cheeks, penetrating slightly into her skull. He dragged her to her feet and took hold of the busk at the center of her corset. When he yanked his hand loose from her, her teeth rattled and she saw stars.

  "Take her. The queen wishes an audience with her." He released her into the clutches of five herders. They were gloved and cloaked in leather; neither her blood nor the water could hurt them. Like the handle of the axe, it felt disconcerting and familiar. "Do you like it?" The commander petted the cloak of the herder beside him. "It is the finest angel-flesh imaginable. And the only thing able to protect us from the likes of you." He glared at the shimmering blood that clotted on her skin. "We usually take an Aldias vintage; thus far they’ve been the only ones fool enough to come here. But now we shall see if the rumors are true, if Gyony hide makes superior impenetrable leather. As soon as the queen has had her way with you, then it will be our turn. Our leathersmiths are honing their blades as we speak." He pinched her arm and tugged on the skin. "Do not fret, little dear, you can endure quite well here without your skin."

  Laughing, he turned on his heel and, leaving his fallen reapers behind him, dragged Portia into the wretched streets of Salus.

  The garden had been trampled and the wall crushed. The reapers pulled Portia through the wreckage, whistling and clicking among themselves. The road leading to the sanctuary was familiar, bordered as it was by bleak gardens filled with skeletal trees that shrank back from the captain and his sea of troops.

  A group of reapers called out in some kind of code, and the captain replied gruffly, sending them off into a side street. They flushed the ghost of a young man from the porch of one of the creaking old houses and took off after him like a pack of hounds. Portia pulled against her captors, but they held her tightly, whirring in chastisement.

  The reapers ran down the young man, catching him as he sought to scale a garden wall. Their barbs sank into him, and as he howled in pain, they descended. Portia cried out and the ghost looked at her. His eyes went wide with fearful awe as the reapers lashed him with a heavy cord and bore him away toward the factories. He kept straining to watch Portia as they took him away.

  The herders fell in close behind their captain. He whistled sharply and the remaining reapers broke away and slipped into the black streets of Salus to track more prey. The captain retained only a few reapers to flank Portia’s guards. The five herders took turns holding her between two of them, with one fore and one behind and the last one holding the hounds, but she had no strength left in her to struggle.

  A soft echo of footsteps tagged after them, and as Portia craned her neck to look around, she saw Kanika creeping in the shadows behind them. The girl wore Portia’s jacket and had the satchel slung across her narrow shoulders. She followed a few yards behind them, and if the captain noticed her, he did not seem to care and neither did his reapers.

  The swirling mist that protected the sanctuary got lost behind the city’s jagged skyline and vanished from view. And with it, Imogen.

  —7—

  THEY FOLLOWED the winding, wayward streets for an eternity, turning up boulevards lined with sickly grey plants that never saw daylight and marching down passages so narrow they could not fit three abreast and one herder had to reluctantly let go of her. Portia had not imagined the city was so large, but then she realized that it was not, and that this was some further tactic to break her. They passed the same grotesque light post three times. Portia knew it by the graffiti scrawled on it in what looked like drying blood: when my Soul is Lost what am I then?

  The buildings clustered together like old women, shadows drawn close as shawls. Portia could feel the eyes of the spirits around her watching her hungrily.

  The herders and the captain led her into a courtyard. Impressive ruins loomed overhead, blocking out the sky with its strangely shaped turrets that reached up from the rectangular structure. The herders spoke amongst themselves in reedy, whistling tones that seemed perfectly sensible to them, and even to the hounds, but left Portia confused.

  Outside the sanctuary, the courtyard and its surrounding buildings were the most beautiful bits of Salus she had seen. The paving stones were smooth and large, joined snugly against one another. The captain strode across them, his black boots ringing on those sandy-gold cobbles. The herders turned her face toward their leader, needing only the lightest touches in their repulsive gloves.

  The captain dropped to one knee and stroked a stone. "The finest souls are brought here for Her Majesty’s pleasure. The demonmancers, the necromancers, the foolish ones who come here whole. Fractured souls of the restless dead are well and good for the city, but for the pa
lace she takes only the best." He rose and pointed to an area not far from them where the paving ended, showing black soil beneath. "Soon, you will take your place here. After we skin you, of course." He came close, smiling cruelly with his leathery, thin lips. "I will enjoy walking all over you. I will make it my special pleasure each and every day."

  Portia stayed silent, although a thousand pleas and cries for mercy lodged behind her teeth. These creatures may have been human once, but no longer. She could sense the empty place where their hearts once were. No, she would find no mercy here.

  The smaller units that had gone off returned now, converging on the courtyard with their quarry dragged slack between their spined arms. They grunted out some sort of marching song as they came, falling into formation.

  The captain raised a gloved fist, and his army moved as one, bringing its prey up wide steps that were made of a different kind of stone, mottled and flecked with bits of iridescence. This stone was more beautiful, but also more fragile, crumbling along the edges and shot with cracks and fissures. As Portia neared, she could see the entire structure had been constructed of this same material in varying colors, and it lent the awe-inspiring palace the air of an ancient temple in magnificent deterioration.

  Two of the herders assigned to her broke away and approached two enormous bronze doors that sealed the entrance. It took both of them to turn the great wheel set into a disk of metal between them. What Portia had thought naught but whimsical motifs of interlocking rings began to move, creating a kaleidoscope effect as the gears and cogs engaged and moved together in a discordant symphony. The doors swung inward with surprising ease, showing a dark foyer.

  The captain walked ahead of them, heedless of the dark, and the others followed him into the decaying palace. As the doors slammed shut, she heard the gears clang back into place with the sound of a death knell.

  She hated the touch of those Nephilim-leather gloves across her flesh, but in the depths of shadows within the building, the herders needed to guide her, even carry her, through one cavernous room after another. The sounds of their whistling, tea-kettle language and the shuffling of their feet seemed overly loud; the whimpers of the other souls and the grunts of the reapers were deafening. The steady stride of the captain echoed like thunder in the darkness. At the end of a long hall, they came to a stop. A light burst forth from between a set of double doors elaborately carved with Oriental fancies. It dazzled Portia’s eyes, and she flinched away, catching sight of the captain’s satisfied smirk as she did so. Before she could recover herself, they dragged her into the room, cringing and shutting her eyes, unable to deny her body’s automatic response to the sudden change in brightness.

  Portia looked at the floor, made up of long slabs of marble, black and veined in sickly red, and waited for her eyes to adjust. The support pillars around them might have been fine once, but the iridescent marble cladding that also comprised the steps and façade had crumbled away from most of them, leaving the plain brick core exposed. Portia had to laugh to herself at the irony. Whatever substance went into that fine stone was not as sturdy as the fractured souls the captain had earlier disparaged.

  "Never disparage the strength of the human spirit," she murmured. The herder on her left clicked, as if in reply.

  She raised her head to take a better look around. The light was still potent, but she could squint against it now. Above them loomed Gothic arches, cloaked in cobwebs, that ran the length of the grand chamber like ribs.

  The captain made obeisance to the black marble dais upon which rested a single throne carved of glossy dark wood. Shaped like a thorned tree, it bore hundreds of tiny leaves fashioned out of coppery dark shadow-gold. Vine-like coils rose up the back of the great chair to a taloned peak upon which rested an enormous crimson jewel. Decadent and morose, the throne dominated the dais and commanded attention.

  The woman resting there on disintegrating cloth-of-gold cushions was occupied counting a tall stack of shadow-gold coins. She deliberately dropped one on top of the other, gazing at them with half-lidded eyes and a satisfied smile as each clink resonated throughout the hall. Her hair, the color of warm honey, rolled in thick waves down her shoulders to pool around her full hips. Her cream-white flesh gleamed with an unnatural pearlescent sheen, covered only by the drape of a fleshy wing nearly the same golden color of her hair and glittering softly in the light.

  When finally she had contented herself with the number of coins she had, she turned her fathomless black eyes onto Portia. The herders forced Portia to her knees. Two gripped her shoulders, two held her wings stretched out, and the last dug its knee into the small of her back. But Portia could still see the queen, looking up at her through the screen of her silver hair.

  The queen’s laughter chimed. "You thought I would be ugly, didn’t you?" She rose from the throne, unfolding her lithe body and coming to stand before them. Her silky flesh bore no marks: not a freckle, mole, or scar to mar its pristine beauty. Portia immediately thought of the puckered ribbons of flesh that wrapped her body and envied the queen’s perfect thighs and belly. The demoness settled her bat-like wings about her shoulders, letting them drape gently over her arms beneath her hair, and smiled. It was a cruel smile, and one that told Portia this woman knew full well what power she wielded. Portia thought of Imogen, then, of her flesh sprinkled with auburn freckles and just a few tiny scars. Imogen had always believed that discretion was the better part of valor. Imogen—Portia clenched her eyes shut against the vision of her beloved—now lost amid mists and secrets.

  Having lost Portia’s rapt attention, the queen huffed and snapped her fingers for the captain.

  "Lahash, what else have you brought me, besides this little treasure?"

  The captain bowed curtly and motioned the nearest group of reapers forward. They held the young man who had tried to run. "Just one portion of the harvest."

  The queen turned her back on Portia and approached the young man. Although beaten and exhausted, he held his head high, meeting her gaze defiantly. Her hand lashed out, lightning-fast, as if to strike. The young man blinked but did not flinch. She pressed her fingertips to his face, cupping his jaw and chin in her ivory palm.

  "Perfect," she purred. "I daresay his corpse is hardly even cold over in the living realm. This gives us excellent leverage, a strong connection. Take him downstairs. Feed him to the machine."

  He fought as they dragged him away, his shouts reverberating through the hall. Portia had but shifted her weight toward him when Lahash grabbed her by the wrist and, twisting it roughly, managed to bring her nearly to her knees. Portia struggled to keep her feet under her and lowered her hips into a crouch.

  "While quite laudable, your heroics have no place here," the captain said.

  "Oh, Lahash," the queen chided, "she’s no threat to me in my own home. Let her up." Her tone might have been construed as kindly, but Portia could hear the keen edge that played beneath her words. The commander released his grip and Portia rose. "Thank you, Lahash. You are dismissed."

  "But, your Majesty—"

  "Go on, now. Run along and find me another tasty morsel like that dumpling you just brought me."

  Through a clenched jaw, Lahash conceded. "Yes, my queen." He motioned for the herders to stay put, and he left the audience chamber.

  The queen watched him go, and as soon as the double doors had shut, she turned her chilling, prismatic smile onto Portia. "Now, my dear, let us get acquainted."

  Portia sensed the well of power beginning to fill within her once more. The angel essence exerted itself, pressing on and stretching the bonds. Feeling wholly different from the battle at the sanctuary, the soul within her opened like a rose, peeling back layer after layer until a glowing sphere remained, like a pearl, in its center.

  The queen, unconscious of the alchemy within, inclined her head toward Portia as if bestowing royal permission. "You may speak to me. I have long waited to hear your voice, Portia Gyony."

  What rose from Portia’
s lips was not her own voice, although she could feel the words flow across her tongue as if they were hers. The sound echoed from the glow at her core, playing her vocal chords like a fiddle.

  "Belial," she said. Thunder and ocean waves crashed within the name. "Beautiful deceiver. It is no wonder that I would find you here. I should have known your foul hand was in this." And as she spoke, Portia knew. With the words came the visions. Portia saw Imogen kneeling in this very hall, her red hair veiling her face as she suffered the boot of Lahash against the nape of her neck. Although Imogen had been allowed passage through the dark and brutal streets of Salus to the safety of the sanctuary, it had not been without reason or without cost.

  Imogen’s soul glowed brighter than the rest, tied to a body that still lived. She cast an aura that radiated beyond the under-side and Portia saw the avarice in Belial’s gaze. Imogen had been spared for a reason, a terrible reason. Portia had thought that Imogen was simply the bait in a cunning trap designed for herself, but that was far from the entire truth. Belial desired Imogen’s soul for its purity and its power and its attachment to the world of the living, and she wanted it for far more than just a pretty paving stone. The answer lay beneath her feet, deep in the bowels of the palace, where they had taken the young man. To the machine.

  The vision passed and Portia raised her eyes to the woman before her. "I know what you want of Imogen. And what would you have of me, Belial?"

  If the demoness queen was discomfited, she hid it well. The light played over her golden ivory features, gleaming on teeth that looked starkly white against her blood red mouth. She chuckled and shifted her weight, thrusting out one hip and folding her arms across her naked breasts. She gazed down her elegant nose at Portia.

  "Do not play brave with me, little girl. I know all about you. I helped to create you."

  Portia could not hide the shade of surprise and dread that coursed through her features. It caught her entirely off guard. "What?"